Randall
Parker opines that the solution to the population crisis in the developed nations is a radical extension of human lifespans.

Meanwhile, in another thread, he mentions the impending bankruptcy of both Social Security and Medicare due in no small part to... extension of human lifespans.

I see no small amount of cognitive dissonance here. Parker's utopian vision appears to be of people giving up government benefits and perhaps
even tax-favored pensions in order to keep working tens or hundreds of years
beyond the time when people are normally worm food. I can just as easily
see a dystopian vision, where the growing class of seniors who are either part
of or about to enter a priviledged class with an ever-growing lifelong vacation
ahead of them use their voting power to prevent any such thing from happening
for as long as they can. The result: an acceleration of the
coming economic collapse of governments and even whole societies.

I have no doubt that science can bring us wonders which were previously the
exclusive province of dreams and fables. I do have doubts that we have
the political maturity to acknowledge and embrace all of their necessary
consequences, as earth-shaking as they might be. The pyramid schemes
of the newly-freed ex-Soviet bloc nations may have surprised some of us
in the West with the breadth and the depth of the damage they did, and
with the number of suckers that the con artists found. But it's hard
to say that they should have known better when our own government-blessed
Ponzi schemes are doing the same to us on a longer time scale, and we refuse
to muster the political will to fix the problem at its various sources.
¶ 3/20/2004 09:25:00 PM